Stats

Category: Networking

Almost 3 years ago I have published an article how to set up layer 2 VPN between on-prem vSphere environment and vCloud Director Org VDC.

As both vCloud Director and NSX evolved quite a bit since to simplify the whole set up, here comes the part II.

Let me first summarize the use case:

The tenant has an application that resides on 3 different VLAN based networks running in its own (vSphere) datacenter. The networks are routed with existing physical router. The tenant wants to extend 2 of these networks to cloud for cloud bursting or DR purposes, but not the 3rd one (for example because there runs a physical database server).

This means the full setup can be done by the tenant in self-service fashion

Here are the steps:

The tenant will deploy freely available NSX Standalone Edge in its datacenter connected to trunk port with 2 VLANs mapped (10 and 11). Additional network configuration is necessary (forged transmits and promiscuous mode or sink port creation – see the link)

In the cloud Org VDC tenant deploys two routed Org VDC networks with identical subnets and gateways as networks A and B. These networks must be connected to the Org VDC Edge GW via subinterface (there can be up to 200 such networks on single Edge). The Org VDC Edge must have advanced networking enabled.

Tenant enables and configures L2VPN server on its Org VDC Edge GW. Note that this is a premium feature that the service provider must enable in Organization first (see this blog post).

Before the L2VPN tunnel is established the following must be taken into account:

The Org VDC Edge GW IP addresses are identical with the on-prem existing physical router. Therefore Egress Optimization Gateway addresses must be entered in the Peer Site configuration. That will prevent the Org VDC Edge GW from sending ARP replies over the tunnel.

The same must be performed on the Standalone NSX Edge via CLI (see egress-optimize command here).

The non-stretched network (subnet C) must be configured on the Org VDC Edge GW so it knows that the subnet is reachable through the tunnel and not via its upstream interface(s). This option however is not in vCloud UI, instead vCloud networking API must be used.Alternatively the provider could configure non-stretched network directly in the NSX UI:

Finally, the tunnel can be established by configuring L2VPN server details on the on-prem Standalone NSX Edge L2VPN client (endpoint IP, port, credentials, encryption) and providing VLAN to tunnel mappings.

Note to find the Org VDC network subinterface tunnel mapping vCloud API must be used again:

Advertisements

Share this:

Like this:

vCloud Director version 9 introduces support for the last major missing NSX feature – the distributed logical router (DLR). DLR provides optimized router which in distributed fashion performs routing between different logical switches in the hypervisor. The routing always happens in the hypervisor running the source VM which means that the traffic goes between maximum two ESXi hosts (source and destination) and no tromboning through third host running router VM is necessary. Read here for technical deep dive into how this works. This not only provides much better performance than traditional Edge GW routing, but also scales up to 1000 routed logical networks (as opposed to 10 on Edge GW or up to 209 if trunk port is enabled).

Generally, DLR should be used for routing only between VXLAN based logical switches, although NSX supports VLANs networks with certain caveats as well. Additionally dynamic routing protocols are supported as well and managed by Control VM of the DLR.

Now let’s look how vCloud Director implements DLR. The main focus was making DLR very simple to use and seamlessly integrate with the existing networking Org VDC concepts.

DLR is enabled on Org VDC Edge Gateway which must be already converted to advanced networking. You cannot use DLR without Org VDC Edge Gateway! There must be one free interface on the Edge (you will see later on why).

Once DLR is enabled, a logical DLR instance is created in NSX in headless mode without DLR Control VM (the instance is named in NSX vse-dlr-<GW name) (<UUID>)). vCloud Director can get away without Control VM as dynamic routing is not necessary – see later below.

DLR has default gateway set to the Org VDC Edge GW interface (10.255.255.249)

New Org VDC networks now can be created in the Org VDC with the choice to attach them to the Edge Gateway (as regular or subinterface in a trunk) or to attach them to the DLR instance.For each distributed Org VDC network a static route will be created on the Org VDC Edge Gateway to point to the DLR uplink interface. This means there is no need for dynamic routing protocols on the DLR instance.

Static Routes on NSX Edge GW

In the diagram below is the networking topology of such setup.

In the example you can see three Org VDC networks. One (blue) traditional (10.10.10.0/24) attached directly to the Org VDC Edge GW and two (purple and orange) distributed (192.168.0.0/24 and 192.168.1.0/24) connected through the DLR instance. The P2P connection between Org VDC Edge GW and DLR instance is green.

DHCP relay agents are automatically configured on DLR instance for each distributed Org VDC network and point to DHCP Relay Server – the Org VDC Edge GW interface (10.255.255.249). To enable DHCP service for particular distributed Org VDC network, the DHCP Pool with proper IP Range just needs to be manually created on the Org VDC Edge Gateway. If Auto Configure DNS is enabled, DHCP will provide IP address of the Org VDC Edge P2P interface to the DLR instance.

Some networking features (such as L2 VPN) are not supported on the distributed Org VDC networks.

VLAN based Org VDC networks cannot be distributed. The Org VDC must use VXLAN network pool.

IPv6 is not supported by DLR

vApp routed networks cannot be distributed

The tenant can override the automatic DHCP and static route configurations done by vCloud Director for distributed networks on the Org VDC Edge GW. The tenant cannot modify the P2P connection between the Edge and DLR instance.

Disabling DLR on Org VDC Edge Gateways is possible but all distributed networks must be removed before.

Both enabling and disabling DLR on Org VDC Edge Gateway are by default system administrator only operations. It is possible to grant these rights to a tenant with the granular RBAC introduced in vCloud Director 8.20.

DLR feature is in the base NSX license in the VMware Cloud Provider Program.

Edit 02/10/2017: Engineering (Abhinav Mishra) provided a way how to change P2P subnet between the Edge and DLR. Add the following property value with CMT:

VXLAN Network Pool is recommended to be used as it scales the best. Until version 9, vCloud Director would create new VXLAN Network Pool automatically for each Provider VDC backed by NSX Transport Zone (again created automatically) scoped to cluster that belong to the particular Provider VDC. This would create multiple VXLAN network pools and potentially confusion which to use for a particular Org VDC.

In vCloud Director 9 we have the option to create our own VXLAN network pool backed by a NSX Transport Zone manually created and scoped to clusters we want to (and using any control plane mode).

During creation of Provider VDC we then have a choice to create a new VXLAN Network Pool (the legacy behavior) or use an existing one.

Advantages of the new feature are:

No more clutter of large amount of VXLAN network pools (if there are many Provider VDCs)

Simpler way to use hybrid or unicast control plane modes (vCloud Director would always default to multicast before)

Control over scope of VXLAN networks – especially useful for sharing Org VDC networks between Org VDCs from different Provider VDCs.

Adhering to best practice of scoping transport zone to whole vDS (more here)

Like this:

Quick post about an issue I discovered in my lab during upgrade to NSX 6.3.3. This particular NSX version has a silent new feature that verifies if syslog configuration on Edges is correct. If the syslog entry is incorrect (it is not an IP address or FQDN with at least one dot character or does not have TCP/UDP protocol specified) it will not let you save it. This however also means that older Edges (with version 6.3.2 or older) that have incorrect syslog setting will fail to be upgraded as the incorrect config will not be accepted.

So how does it relate to the title of the article? If you have vROps in your environment with NSX-V management pack and you have enabled Log Insight integration, the Management Pack will configure syslog on all NSX components. Unfortunately in my case it configures them incorrectly with only hostname and no protocol. This reconfiguration happens roughly every hour. This might be especially annoying in vCloud Director environment where all the Edges are initially deployed with syslog setting specified by VCD, but then are changed within an hour by vROps to something different.

Anyway, the remediation is simple. Disable the Log Insight integration of the vROps NSX Management Pack as shown on the picture below.